


That Was Just Your Life

by messageredacted



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:49:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted/pseuds/messageredacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bobby can’t save anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Was Just Your Life

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Всего лишь твоя жизнь](https://archiveofourown.org/works/924164) by [Rassda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rassda/pseuds/Rassda)



> Originally written 19 December 2008. Updated with Bobby's wife's real name, but no other updates were made to reflect official canon.

The first night, Bobby sets the stuff up on the front porch. He drags out a table, brings out the Bunsen burner, the bullet molds, the bottles of holy water and the tray of silver bits that he buys at pawn shops, old silverware and rings and lockets.

“I could help, you know,” Ruby says to him, her arms crossed, standing next to the doorway. Bobby ignores her.

Finally he brings out a chair, just one, and sits down. He rests his forearms on the table and looks at her.

“Well?” he says.

“Yeah, bite me,” she replies. “I’m doing _you_ a favor, old man. It’s not the other way around.”

He just sits and stares. She meets his gaze coldly but her eyes remain green. Apparently she’s too wise to try that shit with him.

“Why don’t I believe you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart?” Bobby drawls after a minute.

Ruby keeps staring at him and maybe there is a flicker of black in her eyes, there and gone before Bobby even can register it. Maybe not. Maybe he imagined it. Her lip lifts slightly in a sneer of disgust and then she steps toward the table.

“I hope you’re smarter than you look, because this is complicated,” she says, and picks up a silver fork.

 

##

 

The car hums into the driveway. Bobby stares up at the underside of the transmission, pausing. There’s the beginning of a sound in that hum, something that he’s going to have to look at.

“You under there?” A car door slams and he hears Karen crunch through the gravel. “I’ve got some groceries.”

His toes are sweating inside of his construction boots, the only part of his body that’s not shaded by the car. He pulls himself out from under the car, wipes his hands on the dirty rag in his pocket.

Karen has two paper bags of groceries in her arms and she shoots him a smile as he gets to his feet. “There’s pastrami for lunch.”

“My favorite,” Bobby replies, and he plants a kiss on her cheek. She giggles and shies away.

“Don’t get grease on me!” she exclaims, but then steps forward again, tilts her head up and captures his lips with hers in a slower kiss. She pulls back just as it starts to get interesting and grins at him. “Better wash up before lunch.”

He grabs the other two bags of groceries and follows her into the house.

##

They work by candlelight until it’s good and dark out. Bobby keeps a shotgun packed with rock salt leaning against the side of his chair and he keeps a wary eye out on the darkness. He’d unthinkingly put the yard floodlights on when it started to get dark out, but they just strobed and flickered and Ruby had shrugged at him with a smirk, so he left them off. Over the railing of the porch, the yard and the cars beyond are in pitch blackness.

The heat from the Bunsen burner and the hot, shimmering molten silver brings sweat prickling on Bobby’s face, leaving half moons under his armpits. Ruby has pulled back her hair in a knot and her skin gleams with a healthy pink glow. She’s leaning over a notebook of scrawled Latin, reading the incantation as she pours the silver into a mold.

The incantation makes Bobby’s teeth hurt and his ears ring. Something trickles down the side of his neck and he touches it and checks his fingers, half expecting blood, but it’s just sweat. He pushes back his chair and gets up.

Ruby doesn’t look up at him as he stretches and then pushes the screen door of the house open, stepping over the line of salt. There’s a plastic bucket of rock salt just inside the door and he picks it up by its wire handle and steps back out onto the porch. He takes the plastic scoop from inside and starts running a line around the edge of the porch.

The incantation stops and Ruby looks up. “Afraid of the dark?” she says.

“Not too keen on what’s in it.” Bobby shovels up another scoop and extends the salt line. He steps around the table, finishes the line against the side of the house.

Ruby eyes the salt line, then goes back to the incantation. Bobby puts the bucket of salt down next to his chair and sits again.

Another two hours and then Ruby looks up. “Is there some sort of food around here? I’m starving.”

Bobby doesn’t move, although he’s getting a little hungry too. “Demons need to eat?” he says.

Ruby smirks a little. “Doesn’t hurt,” she says. When he continues to stare, she adds, “If the body starves, I won’t die. But…” She shrugs. “I won’t look as pretty.”

 

##

 

After the groceries are put away, Bobby showers, and comes out of the bedroom to find a sandwich waiting. Karen is stirring cream into her coffee.

“Much better,” she says to him with a wink. He sits down across from her and picks up the sugar jar, spooning some into his own coffee.

“How was the library?”

Karen shrugs. “Same as ever. Quiet. I’m going to work all day for the book fair tomorrow, so you’ll have to find your own lunch.” She laughs a little. “Try not to forget to eat.”

“I think I can manage,” Bobby says, and takes a big bite of his sandwich.

She leans on the table. “You’re supposed to say that you don’t think you can manage without me.”

Bobby swallows the bite of sandwich and even though she’s smiling at him, teasing him, he can’t seem to bring himself to be anything other than serious. “I can manage,” he said. “But I don’t know if I’d want to.”

 

##

 

Bobby heats some leftover soup in the microwave and pours it into two bowls. He eats his standing up at the counter, staring fixedly at his own reflection in the kitchen window. The kitchen table is too covered with books and papers and bits of old weapons to ever be used to eat at. When he’s done, he puts the bowl in the sink, takes the other bowl of now-lukewarm soup, and brings it outside.

Ruby doesn’t thank him when he sets the bowl next to her, but Bobby doesn’t particularly care.

They trade places and he even lets her take the chair. He glances through the Latin incantation, then takes the molten silver from the burner and starts reading out loud. It’s not surprising to him that Samuel Colt only ever made six bullets for his gun. These are a bitch and a half to make, and they haven’t even gotten to the fermented blood of a virgin.

Ruby has finished the entire bowl of soup when he finishes the incantation and sets the mold aside to cool. “This part was the easy part,” she said unnecessarily, echoing his thoughts. “Tomorrow we need to get some other supplies.”

“Tomorrow,” Bobby says. The last batch of silver is heating on the burner. They’ve got five bullets waiting in a neat little pile.

“Got a spare couch?” Ruby asks.

For a minute he thinks that he might tell her to sleep on the porch. He might even give her a bucket to pee into if she needs it. But instead what comes out of his mouth is, “Yeah.”

 

##

 

After lunch, Karen heads to the vegetable garden to pull up some weeds and Bobby opens up the hood of her car. The radio on the porch is playing something bluesy. He rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.

He can lose himself in the work sometimes. Karen wasn’t really kidding when she told him not to forget to eat, because it’s happened before. It isn’t until the radio starts cutting in and out, clouded with static, that he notices that it’s been about three hours and the back of his neck is throbbing with the start of a pretty nasty sunburn. He straightens slowly, putting a hand on his back, and wipes sweat from his face.

The vegetable garden is empty, although Karen’s tools are still on the ground by a neatly stacked pile of weeds. Bobby licks cracked lips and decides it’s probably time for a glass of water.

“Al?” he calls when he gets into the house. After the bright sunlight outside, the house seems dark. He steps into the bathroom and washes his hands and face, then returns to the kitchen and pours a glass of ice water.

Glass in hand, he goes to the back door and looks out, but the yard is empty.

“Are you looking for me?”

Bobby turns around. Karen is in the doorway of the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe. Her skin is slick with sweat from the heat and her dark hair is tied back off her neck, exposing the gleaming curve of skin from under her ear down to her clavicle.

“Just wondering where you were,” Bobby says.

“Around,” she replies, dropping her head and looking up at him through her lashes. “You’ve got a sunburn.”

Bobby rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah…”

“Maybe you should stay in out of the sun for a while,” Karen says, and smiles. She steps into the room and he can see that she’s carrying a gardening trowel. Clumps of dirt are dropping to the floor but she doesn’t seem to care. She drops it onto the counter next to him with a clatter and then presses her body against his, her breasts squishing against his chest. She takes a hold of his hand and brings the cold glass up to her cheek, closing her eyes with a soft sigh of pleasure.

“Al,” he begins, and he’s not really sure what he was planning to say when she opens her eyes again and takes the glass from him, takes a gulp of the ice water, slurping one of the ice cubes into her mouth. She smiles at him, a slow, wide predatory smile, and the ice cube clicks against the back of her teeth. She slides down his body and gets down on her knees.

He’s already so hard he thinks he might pop like a champagne cork and when she takes him into her mouth his back bows and he clutches at the counter. There is ice and teeth and this is like he’s getting blown for the first time in his life. This is like he has a wild animal in front of him, around him, and on the edge of the insane pleasure is more than a little bit of wide-eyed nervousness.

He’s curling over, hands in her hair, and he hears himself say “Karen.” She rolls her eyes up to look at him and they’re dark, the pupils dilated—no, not that. The whites are black, the irises black, like an oil slick across her eyes.

He’s jerking back before he realizes it, his cock slipping wetly from her mouth. “Your eyes,” he says, and the words jumble up behind his teeth, “are you okay” or “your eyes are black” or “what’s wrong” but before he can get any of that out, she gropes up on the counter and grabs the trowel.

He is stupidly slow. Or maybe it’s not so stupid that he doesn’t expect her to angle the trowel towards his gut and jam it forward like a knife. Bobby brings up his hand to stop it, not catching it in time. The metal edge opens a cut on his palm, glances off his hip bone, drags a furrow in the soft white flesh of his belly. Blood jumps to the surface of his skin, startled.

“Karen, what the hell—” He slaps a hand to the cut, stemming the blood flow, and Karen raises the trowel again.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” she coos, licking her teeth. The trowel darts forward and he leaps back, fumbling to button his pants. “Does your tummy hurt? Want me to kiss it and make it better?”

“What is going on?” Bobby gasps out. She lunges forward, her arm arcing up and he grabs at her wrist, intending to break her grip. He latches on but can no more stop her swing than he could stop an oncoming train. She is impossibly strong, or maybe he’s just gone weak against her.

The trowel hits his side and digs in a few inches, chipping a rib. Bobby lets out a choked-off howl. There are no neighbors around to hear him scream. Does he want to call for help?

He lets go of her wrist and scrambles away from her, ass hitting the counter. He slides sideways to the back door and as he’s moving, he’s thinking _She was in some sort of accident, she hit her head, her eyes are filled with blood, she has a brain injury and she’s gone crazy. If I can restrain her, get her to the hospital, she’ll be okay—_

And he thinks that until he reaches the back door, when suddenly he’s being dragged backwards like he’s on a wire. He hits the far wall, his head cracking back and denting the plaster.

Karen is standing in the middle of the room, trowel at his side, hair hanging around her face, a feral smile curling her mouth. She is too far away to have thrown him, and even if he can come up with a logical explanation for her incredible strength, it’s harder to explain how she threw him without ever touching him, and how he can’t lift his arms and legs. He can barely breathe. It’s like there’s a giant hand holding him against the wall.

Karen steps toward him, stalking on long legs. The tip of the trowel is dripping blood. She drops to a squat in front of him, still smiling.

“What’s a guy like you doing with a girl like me?” she purrs, dragging the tip of the trowel on the linoleum so it leaves a red line. “Fat old car mechanic, pretty young wife…” She reaches up, cups her own breast. “You don’t look like you have lots of money.”

“Karen,” Bobby rasps, “we can get you help. You’re not thinking straight.”

“Karen,” she says in a sing-song, drawing it out. “Karen is thinking clearly for the first time in her short, sheep-like life. She wants to cut your gut open and watch you bleed to death on the floor. Then she’s going to find herself some fun. How does that sound?”

Bobby feels his breath catching somewhere in his throat. “You don’t want that. I know you don’t. I love you, baby.”

“Oh.” She reached out and draws one finger down his sweaty cheek. “Well, in that case…” The trowel jams in to his stomach.

Bobby tries to double over but he can’t move. He feels his eyes rolling back in his head, feels himself whining with the pain. His breath comes in short, wet jerks.

“You still want to talk me out of it?” She puts the trowel down on the floor, straddles his waist, cups his head in both her hands. “Baby?” Her eyes are not blood. They are black as jet marbles. She smiles at him and the black flicks away like a camera shutter opening, showing Karen’s gray eyes, then snaps shut again.

“Karen isn’t here right now,” she whispers.

Bobby lets out a half sob. His mouth is thick and dry. She kisses him chastely.

“That’s right. Cry for me, sweetheart.” She brushes her lips over the sweat on his forehead. “Tell me how much it hurts.”

Something seems to let go of his arms and legs and he sags forward, curling into himself, curling around the wounds. Karen cradles his face in her hands, kissing him.

“Karen,” he croaks.

“Oh, honey, Karen is dead,” she coos. “Karen died out in the garden, while you were too busy with your precious car to pay attention to her. She tried to call your name but you didn’t hear her and she died knowing that you weren’t going to come and save her.”

Bobby lets another sob escape him. Karen—or whatever she is now—kisses him, no longer chaste but deep and probing. He can taste himself in her mouth and he feels suddenly sick. His ears are ringing. His vision is fading. He slumps sideways and Karen lets him, letting go of his face and sitting back on her heels to look at his bloody stomach. Bobby’s fingers close on the trowel.

He puts all of his strength behind it and her chest crumples under the blade of the trowel like paper. The trowel cracks through her ribs and comes to a jarring halt when the hilt hits her chest. Karen looks startled, and then she pouts.

“You ruined my dress,” she says, looking down. Bobby drags the trowel out of her. A gush of blood rides the heels of the trowel and splashes down the front of her dress.

She makes no move to defend herself when he slams it into her chest again, but when he moves to withdraw it, her hand shoots up and she grabs his wrist, holding him in place.

Her head tips back and she opens her mouth and suddenly she is vomiting out a torrent of black smoke. It pours from her throat in a column, shooting up to the ceiling and then snaking out the window. The last of it disappears. Karen’s head lolls and her eyes flutter and her mouth works.

“Bobby?” she whispers. Horror floods him. He hauls her up, holding the back of her head with one hand, still holding the trowel with the other. Her hand slips from his wrist. The confused look leaves her eyes and nothing replaces it.

##

It’s hard to say how it happens exactly, but Bobby brings out blankets for the couch and comes across Ruby undressing. She turns, smirks at him, accepts the blankets from him without appearing to care that she’s just in a bra and jeans. Bobby stops, feeling gutshot when he sees the round, raw bullet hole in her chest, bloodless and gaping. He did that. It didn’t hurt Ruby, but there was some blond haired girl inside there who would never be waking up.

“Does that hurt?” he asks before he can stop himself.

She looks down at the bullet hole, looks back up at him. “No.”

He isn’t sure why that disappoints him. Wordlessly, he turns away.

He stops when a bra hooks over his shoulder. He turns back and she’s there, topless, the bullet hole nestled obscenely between two pert breasts.

“You can’t tell me you weren’t thinking about this all night long,” she says to him, her eyes dark in a way that has nothing to do with being a demon.

“I wasn’t,” he lies, and she smiles.

He knows there’s a real girl buried somewhere deep inside Ruby, another girl that might not have any idea what’s going on but who can’t give consent to this. He knows that when he shot Ruby earlier, he didn’t care about that. Ruby doesn’t kiss him. Her hand cups the front of his pants, squeezes. She shucks her own jeans in a flash, helps him out of his. They’re on the couch and he’s cupping her breasts in his hands, kissing the silky flesh there, taking the small, hard nipples in his mouth. She’s got a hand on his cock, working him, and then she straddles his waist. He grabs her hips and they fit together.

“Guess we’re going to have to get blood of a virgin somewhere else,” she whispers against his cheek and he jerks back. She bursts into laughter. He rolls them over, feeling a rush of anger, maybe, and drills into her like he’s trying to punish her, stabs into her again and again. She bites down on his shoulder, making little noises. Then he’s coming, embarrassingly fast, and she reaches down between them, locking her ankles behind his back, and works herself until she comes too.

He gasps against her neck, feeling her ankle slide down his leg.

“Getting heavy,” Ruby says, nudging him.

He sits up, letting her up. Ruby grabs her panties from the floor and drags them on.

“In the morning we’ll finish this batch of bullets,” Ruby says. He suspects she’s trying to dismiss him. He gets up.

He thinks about putting a bullet in her head. But the bullets aren’t ready, and then still need her. Maybe later. Maybe never. The girl inside her is dead anyway. There’s no one left to save.


End file.
